On 7/18/07, John Meacham
Also it's taking forever to compile the Prelude -- it's been compiling all night and it's still on the same line of output as when I went to bed... (I suspect that it would be on a different character if I hadn't piped it through tee and less, though).
Hmm.. this sounds wrong. it is possible there is an infinite loop somewhere. if you compile with some combination of -dcore -dcore-mini -dcore-steps -dcore-pass then you can usually find the culprit in these cases. you will see the same optimizations repeating over and over again. That is usually the cause.
No, it wasn't an infinite loop. It eventually finished (though it sure took it's time writing the .ho file...). I think basically it has poor locality of reference compiling such a large "module".
Also, 'Show' and 'Read' instances for large data types tickle the simplifer in a way that makes it take way way too long. quadratic or even exponential behavior is sneaking in somewhere.
That doesn't surprise me.